


Sacrifice

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Series: Eight Nights [6]
Category: Kings (TV 2009)
Genre: Animal Sacrifice, Jewish Holidays, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 17:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2820623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“God does not ask us for sacrifices because he wants things, David. The reason is the struggle. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?” Jack is holding his rifle and his mouth is a thin line, but David cannot fathom what he is disapproving of today.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sacrifice

There are things that God demands, and David knows them all - they layer inside of his heart and press there; words first, prayers syncopating against the insistent thud of his heartbeat. Then actions: all the rules set by God for man, barring the ones set by man for other men. Finally, the literal sacrifice. Death dealed out. 

David is a farmboy, killing a chicken for dinner or hunting game is nothing new, nothing taboo. But this kind of death, when he holds tightly the head of a lamb and holds the knife with the other, to present it to God, there is something that settles poorly in him over this. He could not say why. Nathan is the one who found her, who tied a rope around her neck and brought her, though the lamb would have followed Nathan wherever she stepped.

“There’s no reason for this.”

Nathan doesn’t reply. 

No, it’s Jack. “God does not ask us for sacrifices because he wants things, David. The reason is the struggle. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?” Jack is holding his rifle and his mouth is a thin line, but David cannot fathom what he is disapproving of today.

The deed is done and the night falls, and David things it is stupid to cry over a small death like this, but he cries just the same, and crawls into the small tent at the edge of his camp, where Jack is curled in a tiny ball in the corner, his bedroll the same color as the mud he’s sleeping in. They’re all that color. 

“Can I stay?” David asks, and Jack, who David thought would be asleep (but why would he ask, if he thought that?) simply turns in his bedroll, undoing a corner of it, and David shucks his boots and slips in next to him. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Go to sleep, David,” Jack says, and David presses his face against Jack’s back, curling against him. He has done this before. He’s not ashamed of it, although part of him thinks that this is a friendship he cannot afford to cultivate, not the way he wishes it to grow. He must prune it into an acceptable shape, else it will reflect badly on Michelle. It will hurt her the most.

But as his hand fists the thick fabric of Jack’s coat, he wants, he wants, he wants. How could anyone deny this? This burning in his belly for the taste of Jack’s mouth, it surpasses anything he’s felt for anyone else, even Jack’s twin, and he does not know how to let it happen.

_What is it like to kiss a man_ , he thinks, even though he has kissed men before, but always drunkenly, always without risk. What is it like to kiss a man and mean it, is what he wants to ask, but he is too cowardly for that. 

And tonight he is more cowardly still, the smell of lambsblood thick in his nostrils, the red of it staining the tents. He doesn’t like it - not the holiday, not the blood, no, he doesn’t like the implication of him killing a lamb, as if the sacrifice of something innocent will get God’s attention. It doesn’t matter what anyone says to him. He does not think he could love a God so cruel.

(Is it worse, that sometimes David thinks he cannot love God at all, when He is so fickle, when He chooses and discards with such casual disdain? If God is so powerful, why not choose Jack? Why can He not see the depth of who Jack could be, when he is given the opportunity?)

(You love him, and so you are blind to his faults.)

~~~~

Jack wakes just after David, just as David’s hands on on his back, just as he is thinking he should leave before Jack remembers that David came to his tent, late at night.

But now it is too late. “Your brothers are going to be annoyed when they can’t find you,” is all Jack can manage, muttering as he turns. David notices that he tries not to touch him, tries to keep his hands to himself, but in the early morning it is as if he forgets, as if the tactile nature of the prince cannot be smothered by rationale or cold logic. He puts an arm on David’s hip, as if they are lovers.

David does not complain. He presses himself closer and knows he should move away. “My brothers have other things to occupy their complaints this week,” he assures Jack, thinking of the grain that Nathan has squirreled away somewhere, where no one can find it. Nathan takes these things seriously, but at the very least they’re allowed beans. The entire camp is annoyed, but she is the only one who would be even slightly immune to the wrath of the men. Anyone else would have been tossed into a frigid river and left to drown, David thinks. 

Jack is waking slowly, David can see it, the cozy fuddlement of sleep leaving his bearing. “No doubt someone will find your lack annoying. You can’t spend all your time with me.”

“You’re the best company in this camp,” David argues, and Jack is awake enough that he’s moving away, and David’s heart protests with the slightest twinge, the barest pain of it. “Let me pretend we’re not set for another day of marching another few minutes.”

“Five minutes more, mother,” Jack says, just this side of cruel, and rises, pulling his boots on. 

David turns to watch him, and cannot help but grin. “Is this how you led your men? With barbs and jabs?” 

Jack looks down. “I led my men with discipline, and I don’t lead anyone anymore. I follow you, until God grants me leave to die. That’s all.”

David does get up then. They have this fight once a week, twice, if Jack is in a particularly foul mood, and every time it feels like Jack is unwinding the veins from David’s body, and David is trying to sort out every nerve in Jack’s. There is no winning. “I should ask him to never grant you that leave.”

“Why? It’s the only thing I’m worth, now,” Jack says, not in a way that makes him sound piteous, but in an honest way, and David thinks that hurts more.

(All David wants is to press his mouth to Jack’s and assure him, once, over and over, a thousand times, that Jack is worth every beat of his heart, and touch their wrists together until those beats are matched and mirrored.)

(Instead he scowls and leaves the tent in a fury, and they get nowhere fast.)

~~~~~

To no one’s surprise, everyone hates beans, especially since no one really cooks very well; only a few of the men have ever really spent any time cooking anything outside of camp rations, and they’re still _terrible_ at it. The rule is that the first man who complains has to take on the duty of cooking the following day, so they all try and outdo each other with terrible recipes, and everyone chokes it down until someone breaks down.

Today is it beans so undercooked that if they’re eaten they’ll probably poison a man, served with flatbread for the holiday, and slices of meat that are tough and dry. On David’s bowl is a sprig of something green, and probably poisonous. “What this?”

“Bitter herbs,” Ethan mutters mutinously, his tone just barely edging away from _complaint_. “Happy Sacrifice.” This is as close to a proper holiday dinner they’re going to get, and it lodges in David’s gut. Somewhere Jessie is smug over their combined misery.

“If I eat this I’ll be the sacrifice,” David replies, and all his brothers look over at once, and David realizes he’s been caught complaining, “no, no, that wasn’t-” he tries, but it’s too late.

Jack is laughing fit to burst.

It’s a beautiful sound.

~~~~~

Night comes again, and there is no new lamb, not when Nathan is just breaking up the ice on the bucket of blood she kept and painting tents with bloody handprints, and everyone is leaving the prophet to her work. 

David wonders, again, how he ended with her, how the inside of her head must be nothing but God’s voice and the encyclopedic knowledge of the ritual of every holiday and the contents of every prayerbook ever set to man, until there is no room for things like a personal care over matters such as comfort. Or _cleanliness_.

Tonight it is not David who finds Jack, however. It is the other way around. “Your tent is always warmer,” Jack says, taking his boots off and curling up in David’s bedroll. 

“You could just freeze to death,” David says, and doesn’t realize how spiteful it sounds until the words are out of his mouth and hanging in the frigid air between them.

Jack looks up, and the storm in his eyes that usually comes with this fight are not there. Instead they are just a sad, tired gray. “You could do it.”

“I won’t,” David says, and finally grabs him. “Do you think it’s funny? That on this holiday, of all of them, you should say this?”

Jack doesn’t resist it, he just moves with David. “I think this is the most appropriate holiday for it, don’t you? Nathan could dip her hands in my blood and spread it all over Gilboa, and death would pass over the whole nation.”

David punches him, for that, and Jack snarls, but does nothing. “Fight for it,” David hisses, “Come on, fight for it!”

“You’re not going to kill me, and we both know it!” Jack yells back, pushing now, but not enough to dislodge David from him. “I don’t know why you bother, I don’t know why you won’t just rid yourself of me! I am _worthless_ to you!”

_Because I love you_ , David thinks, _because I can sacrifice a lamb but I cannot sacrifice you_ he adds, in his head, _because I look at you and I see a path we could forge together, to heal this country_ is the final point, but he says none of it. “That is not my decision to make. I will not deal your death out,” is all he can manage, giving up the meanest bit of the truth, like the sacrifice of grain instead of the sacrifice of a lamb.

Jack just stares at him, dumbfounded. “You would not let me go,” is what he finally manages, and David releases him, backs away. It is too close to the truth, and he cannot hear Jack’s reply, he cannot listen to Jack mock him, or tell him that it is impossible, he cannot hear the only moral answer Jack can give, which is to remind David of his sister.

“Can we not have this fight again,” David asks, and Jack raises his hands, as if to embrace, but then drops them to his sides. And nods. 

It’s enough. “I’ll leave,” Jack says, reaching for his boots, but David shakes his head.

“Please stay.”

He does.

~~~~~

The morning dawns, and the smell of blood is drying inside of David’s nose, and Jack is holding him like he is all that tethers him to the world.


End file.
